naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
Is this assuming a mostly legitimate election?
Well, I feel like it's already a little late for that; to whatever extent "violating norms" can be said to undermine legitimacy, Harris' circumventing the nomination process to simply assume candidacy has already called into question the legitimacy of this election.
But yeah, I don't think the Democratic machine in the relevant swing states is going to go down without a fight (and a dirty one, if necessary).
Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states. We saw Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's texts; how many three-letter-agency texts have we not seen? How many texts like that were never sent, because the people who might have sent them were smarter than Page and Strzok? (Page and Strzok were ultimately fired, but they sued the government over that, and then settled for a payout of about a million bucks apiece--not exactly the kind of government response that seems likely to discourage similar behavior from others.) We saw Hollywood's faithless elector scheme, how far would they go to prevent a second Trump term? There have already been so many attempts on Trump's life that there is a whole Wikipedia entry dedicated to them, which does not appear to be the case for any other U.S. President or presidential candidate. As we discussed a few weeks ago, there are a lot of people expressing worry over how to convince Republicans to accept a Trump defeat gracefully, and yet when I asked whether there would be any way to convince Democrats to accept a Harris defeat gracefully, no one even attempted to answer that question. Instead, several people flatly denied the demonstrated reality that Democrats in 2016 were working just as hard to change the outcome of the election, as Republicans were in 2020.
Unfortunately, I suspect that no matter who wins this time, the response from the other side will be lawsuits, denials, and probably some riots. Just like in 2016. Just like in 2020.
I'm less comfortable with Trump than you, and I'm thinking Kamala basically did her job of losing gracefully for the Dems.
I'm pretty uncomfortable with Trump; I'm just much, much less comfortable with the idea of packing the Supreme Court with justices who don't know what "woman" means.
Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?
I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."
And yes: when Harris' chances hit 33% on Polymarket, I was sorely tempted to YOLO a lot of money into it. But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.
naraburns
nihil supernum
21d ago
How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition?
To say nothing of using the Supreme Court to impose abortion and same-sex marriage on every single state. Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors. The idea that Trump is the blatant norm-violator requires an awfully selective memory. I don't like Trump, but thanks to him I have been mostly satisfied with what's coming out of the Supreme Court for the first time in my adult life. The idea of returning to an activist Court, but with fresh Wokist judges instead of merely Liberal ones, is in my mind the most realistic bad-and-lasting effect of a Harris victory.
(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")
That said, I think Scott's endorsement is 100% in-character for him, and it's probably worth noting that the reasoning he provides is in response to a case he has first worked to steelman. I suspect it is not a steelman he actually buys--just the best he was able to come up with. Rather, think of what the New York Times put Scott through the last time Trump won a presidential election. I don't know that it was this way for everyone, but in 2016 and 2017 I personally lost about 25% of my social media connections after Clinton's loss, and I didn't even support Trump--I just expressed clear criticism of Clinton. So I suspect that a lot of what we're seeing from Scott here is a kind of rhetorical, anticipatory flinch. Particularly given his somewhat defiant direct link back to "You Are Still Crying Wolf." (Insert Straussian reading here?)
So my biggest concern for this election is not really to do with either candidate, but with my suspicion that either way, the country comes further apart. The one thing I have appreciated from Harris is her bumbling attempts to appeal to the garbage deplorables. Even she (or at least her campaign) realizes that the culture wars are moving the nation in a potentially disastrous direction (not that this seems to have inspired the Left to pump the brakes--yet). But I have to wonder, climate-change-style, if we're not already past the point of no return.
naraburns
nihil supernum
23d ago
Lifewise is a religious organization, the Social Justice Academy is... well some of these programs get a little on the nose with the extent that they're replacements for religion, but...
The evolution of "non-religious" religions like Wokism is in desperate need of better legal analysis. However the Supreme Court hasn't even managed to actually define religion for Constitutional purposes, so I don't see how anyone could convince it to recognize the problem that First Amendment selection pressure has created in the ideological memeplex. Everything that "separation of church and state" was supposed to protect us from, it no longer protects us from, because the church meme has largely evolved into identity politics. "This isn't a religion, this is just what it means to be a good person" is the anti-ideologic-resistant super-meme that resulted from excessive use of the Establishment Clause.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
it sounds like you like slop. I guess that's your perogative.
This is pointless antagonism. It adds nothing but heat to the conversation. Your AAQCs get you some leeway, but that leeway is not infinite.
Three day ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I'm completely flabbergasted by their advertising. It reminds me a bit of Hillary Clinton going to Utah--like, WTF? She's not going to get the votes of stereotypically masculine men, but also she doesn't need the votes of stereotypically masculine men. I get the temptation to try to claim "cross demographic victory" as a mandate to swing for the fences in her presumptive legislative agenda, I understand the culture-building angle of "let's make ideological conservatism extinct." But conservatism is already doing tons of work toward extincting itself, and trying to urge it along only strengthens the perception that partisanship is a fight for ingroup survival rather than a neighborly disagreement over the optimal tax rate.
I don't think Trump can win this, ultimately--but I've been wrong about that before, and if I'm wrong about it again, he will owe Kamala's campaign team a thank-you card.
While I don't have any hard evidence, this thing trips my "scam" intuition big time.
The only "scam" that seems likely here would be overstating the potential. It doesn't look like they're doing anything that isn't already routinely done with IVF, they're just getting more specific and detailed about it, connecting it to current best-understanding data on genetics. IVF clients are already routinely informed of the sex and "strength" of the embryos created, along with obvious stuff like "this embryo has trisomy 21" or whatever. Since there isn't a "big IQ" gene, the best they could do with this particular measure would be "given our current best understanding, embryo A is X% more likely to have increased IQ than embryo B."
That is still a long, long way from doing things like bioengineering superhumans. As the Gattaca line goes--"Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply--the best of you."
EDIT: On reflection I guess my biggest worry about this is that it could exacerbate a certain poorly-understood trend.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Utter nothingburger that should not change anyone's opinion on anything.
The revisions themselves are not surprising and probably shouldn't be taken as strong evidence of anything in particular. But it's not a "nothingburger" when the news media, politicians, etc. use a negative number to "fact check" and excoriate opponents, only to later have that number instead turn out to be positive. Either the numbers mean something or they don't. If the numbers do mean something, then all the news corporations that said "Trump was wrong" should now be printing stories saying "sorry, turns out Trump was right." If the numbers don't mean anything, then all the original news stories saying "Trump was wrong" should have been laughed out of the room from the get-go. Publishing numbers widely because they make your opponent look maximally bad, then ignoring revisions to those numbers, just shows how much the corporate news media (sometimes, Fox News excepted) has straightforwardly become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.
That is far from a "nothingburger."
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Right wing news media today reporting a "quiet" revision to FBI crime statistics, revealing that violent crime rose in 2022, contrary to their initial September 2023 report (and broadly contrary to a recent historical trend).
As the linked article notes, adjustments of this nature are not uncommon, but this particular adjustment flies in the face of fact checks and hit pieces directed against right wing media and political candidates who, apparently, knew better than the FBI. I have been unable to find any retractions thus far, however (and of course do not expect any).
The FBI's process for assembling crime statistics has been under revision for a couple of years, leading to a variety of difficulties for those (like reporters) accustomed to relying on the statistics to establish the truth of perceived trends. As far as I can tell, the initial revisions were motivated by the same sort of social engineering goals that led realty websites to remove crime maps from home search tools. But now maybe some of those changes have been rolled back? It's not totally clear to me what's happening there, beyond a government bureaucracy seemingly looking for ways to prevent the unvarnished truth from generating too much wrongthink while also staving off accusations of being even more useless than usual.
(Or maybe there's a "Schrodinger's Violence" problem, where they need to show increased violence to make strong arguments against the Second Amendment, while also showing decreased violence to bolster Biden's Harris' claim to re-electability?)
While violent crime is still much lower, per capita, than it was ~35 years ago, it is of course still much higher than it was circa 1960, when the United States was a very different place, demographically. The 21st century nadir seems to be around 2012, and the trend since has been a slight but relatively persistent rise.
Will the FBI's adjustment make a difference in the race for the White House? I guess I'm skeptical; left wing news outlets don't appear to be reporting on the adjustment at all, and since it's about 2022, it's "old news" anyway. The falsehood is out there, its work is done; the truth has only just managed to lace its shoes, and here the race is almost over.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I had the same thought at first, but if you read carefully, the language implies that these "loans" will be available to others. Which others, it doesn't say--all entrepreneurs? Racial minorities? Women? Who knows? But it is a sneaky bit of rhetoric--"we will be giving $20 billion to black men and others!" allows her to make the same claim to several groups separately while only actually committing a single pile of $20 billion.
Not that it's a small amount of money even then. This is why cases like Citizens United were always straining at gnats and swallowing camels. When it comes to buying votes, no corporation in the world can outspend the U.S. government.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
If Harris had simply said she would decriminalize marijuana, I might agree with you. But what she appears to actually say is that she wants to both legalize (a step that implies greater government endorsement than mere decriminalization) and also see to it that young black men are maximally empowered to profit from slinging dope.
For the gun analogy to hold, you would need a candidate promising not only to make gun ownership easier, but also to ensure profitability and a free flow of inventory for aspiring arms dealers seeking to do deals that are currently illegal.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Er...
Young men at highest risk of schizophrenia linked with cannabis use disorder
Adolescents who frequently use cannabis may experience a decline in IQ over time
Now, before y'all @ me with "correlation is not causation," I don't have any strong feelings about marijuana either way. I'm just mystified by the idea that Harris is so certain that young men, especially young black men, would benefit from greater availability of recreational marijuana, that she has made it a highlight of her campaign. Legalized recreational drugs are the ultimate act of privatizing profits while publicizing losses (in the form of negative community externalities), and the tax revenues rarely measure up to expectations. This sounds like a recipe for the exacerbation of a negative trend in the lives of young American men (of whatever color).
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
They've represented an alternative to the tides of mass opinion AND to the Cathedral.
That seems like a nicely succinct way of saying it talks with crowds but keeps its virtue, and walks with kings but keeps the common touch.
Retaining the "common touch" doesn't mean "to be the modal person." It means retaining an ability to relate to, and communicate with, people of no particular importance. Some examples of having lost the "common touch" in policy debates might be, say, pushing new identity terms on people who don't want them, or pretending that student loan forgiveness isn't a handout to the wealthy.
I don't know what I said to inspire such tenacious contrarianism in you, but like... at minimum, you could try disagreeing with me without putting words in my mouth.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I would read The Common Touch as referring to the ability to speak and relate to the common man, the ordinary sort of citizen, the "crowds" referenced in the prior line.
Yes, exactly. People who take their cues from the Cathedral cannot do that, because "the ordinary sort of citizen" has their views grounded in a mix of practical reality and community ingroup signalling, rather than taking their cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites.
Properly, I'd probably contend that French (and most conservative justices) didn't lose the common touch recently, he was never in the same zip code as the common touch.
For starters, "never" can't possibly be right. The first particularly stand-out thing French ever accomplished was to attend Harvard Law School, and even after that he did a lot more public interest work than most Harvard grads deign to undertake. I never got the impression, in 2015, that French was taking his cues from universities, corporate news media, and DC elites. Today, he is clearly taking his cues from the Cathedral, as McLaughlin articulates.
Writers for the National Review are no closer to the common man than is the NYT editorial page.
That may have been true in the era of William F. Buckley, Jr. but I don't think it has been true for, oh, three decades? By the mid 1990s at the latest, National Review was much, much closer to the "common man" than anything the New York Times had on offer. Fittingly, I think that becomes less the case around 2016, for much the same reasons that French goes off the reservation.
There's something kind of funny to me about accusing French of losing "The Common Touch" because of a disagreement on what is ultimately a pretty arcane constitutional provision.
This seems like a pretty aggressive way to miscast what I wrote in that paragraph, which concerned the arc of French's ideological evolution over the last decade. I guess I don't really associate "New York Times Columnist" with "the Common Touch," but I suppose YMMV. Ditching your congregation over political disagreements and then later publicly shaming them for ditching you over political disagreements is also pretty lofty stuff. His bad take on the Supreme Court is in this context just the latest capitulation to his new social group, for whom he seems to serve as a highly convenient "token conservative."
But it sorta feels like The Common Touch as you use it just means "agrees with me."
Not at all. Very roughly, I'd say it means that the grounding of your beliefs is noticeably more substantial than "whatever the Cathedral is saying today." As far as I have been able to determine, French--who has a lot of published positions!--has somehow never thought to endorse term limits on SCOTUS justices until it became a talking point for the Democrats in this election cycle. Even if term limits for SCOTUS justices is a fantastic idea, getting conspicuously behind it now seems like a pretty clear (and potentially even costly) signal, not that you believe anything in particular about the structure of our government, but that you are Team Blue.
As you note, Republican justices have historically drifted over time...which would be a really good argument for term limits? It would allow Republicans to refresh their appointees with fresh blood, rather than allowing a Kennedy to remain on the Court making mushy-headed legislation until he dies.
Indeed. And yet even though it would have been politically beneficial for them to do so, conservative presidents and legislators declined to exercise any authority, Constitutional or otherwise, to undermine the Court. They continued to accept their defeats, eventually won some control of the Court through the usual means (and a whole lot of luck), and then it became a good idea to reform the judiciary? I feel like you have to be giving McLaughlin a shockingly uncharitable read to characterize his problem as merely "these people don't agree with me."
Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level.
Why are you granting the Democrats hyper-agency and turning the GOP into NPCs?
I didn't do that at all. If I wanted to attribute a lack of agency to the GOP, I would have said so. My point was precisely that political competition isn't happening at the object level, and your flipping of the hypothetical to "GOP electoral incompetence" instead of "Democrat managerial incompetence" only illustrates the same point in a different way: political battles are no longer about governance, or at least they are less about governance than they once were (and ought more to be). They are about the meta, they are about tribes, they are about picking a winner and ensuring that the loser never gets a chance to make a comeback. And I think that all of these criticisms apply very well to a great many Republicans, too, such that your closing paragraphs are, at best, ill-targeted rhetoric.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.
Yeah, I suspect that which "starting point" people lean to will be a combination of their ideology and their age. I tend to reflexively regard the Bork hearing as the major inflection point in today's political partisanship, but that couldn't have happened without the Warren Court, and that couldn't have happened without... (on ad infinitum) There are not really events, only points along a process continuum. "Nothing ever happens."
But I agree! It didn't used to be like this. One suspicion I have is that our values pluralism has gotten the best of us. "Values pluralism" for most of our country's history has meant "you can live out any flavor of the European Christian good life imaginable!" When most of the nation shares fundamental values--even the people who opt to live differently, in an "I know I'm a bad person but I just can't help myself" sort of a way--then political parties aren't existential threats, they're just competing visions for implementation. Somewhat boring, really--"we're all welfare statists arguing about the optimal balance between taxation and redistribution." The retreat from values-oriented politics to identity-oriented politics did not happen all at once, but I think it has certainly happened, and the rise of the "alt-right" was just the inevitable result of certain "conservatives" finally getting the message that the time for discussion and compromise was over, and that a new age of tribalism was upon us.
I would like to find a way to reverse that trend, but the Motte is one of the few places I can even discuss it without encountering an outright refusal to engage on the merits.
To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.
Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.
First, to call the Democrats’ proposals “reform” is to take partisan sides by parroting one side’s loaded talking points. . . . Second, these proposals are not “in the air.” They are not emanating from multiple sources in different places on the partisan and ideological spectrum. They are not generated by an impersonal History, before which we must simply stand aside. We would not say that building a wall across the Mexican border is “in the air.” These are the specific ideological demands of one political party. They have been pushed by a particular coterie of activists, all of whom have essentially the same desired policy ends in mind. They arose out of one party’s presidential primaries and its Senate Judiciary Committee members. They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016 when Mark Tushnet was arguing for a triumphal march of liberal and progressive ideology through the courts on the premise that “right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents. . . . Those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”
An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.
The sole reason we are talking about restructuring the Supreme Court is that liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing. And if you are endeavoring now to make a purportedly conservative (or at least non-ideological) case for restructuring, you need to first explain why it is that liberals and progressives being unhappy with outcomes is, in and of itself, a crisis. Why is it not a permissible result of a political process that liberals and progressives get something they dislike? Why is that not legitimate? Why, specifically, does it change the legitimacy of a system that was acceptable when it delivered outcomes that liberals and progressives liked?
French speaks of “instability and anger that harm the court and threaten the rule of law.” Whose anger? Why is the anger of progressives an infallible sign that something must be given to them to assuage it? Do we treat conservatives, let alone MAGA Republicans, as if the mere fact of their anger requires a restructuring of the existing rules to let them win? French typically treats the anger of Donald Trump’s devotees as a problem for the system to resist, not a cause for it to give them more of what they want.
Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."
Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."
So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.
Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.
Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.
So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.
Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
It's highly relevant, because I am trying to figure out what the actual infraction is, and one of the ways I'm going to do that is by comparing what I did to seemingly similar behavior from others.
No, don't compare yourself to unmoderated comments; we don't (can't) moderate every rules violation, because we don't even see most of them. Most of the time, a comment has to get reported first.
So you're saying that if I'd sprinkled in a few hedging words, there wouldn't be a problem? Or if I'd specified "Republicans" and "Democrats"?
"Republicans" and "Democrats" is probably still too general, because those are not meaningfully homogeneous groups beyond the fact of their group membership. You need to specify to a meaningful degree. "People who believe in God" is a very general group, but you can say some things about them in a permissible way. And I definitely didn't say "sprinkle in a few hedging words and there won't be a problem," I said something more like "hedging and honest self report can be mitigating factors, provided the rest of your comment isn't too blatantly terrible in other ways."
That is me characterizing the pattern of thinking I am talking about, as exemplified in the excerpt I quoted.
But first, you never say "suppose someone thinks that..." and second, your characterization slips into weak man territory. Remember, you opened with:
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves)
So this sets the expectation that you think that conservatives (as well as liberals) think, concerning conservatives:
FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them.
It's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you include yourself in "conservatives" or "liberals" so it's impossible to tell, from your comment, whether you are hiding your own views behind a neutral "some people think" point of view, or what. If you're going to run with a "some people think" argument, then you need to be either steel manning it, or proactively providing evidence of what those "some people" actually think.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
You can say conservatives are too stupid to be held accountable, but you can't note that people do this?
While I would not exactly endorse Goodguy's post, (1) other people's behavior is irrelevant to your own and (2) here is what he actually said:
to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid
First off, "to me" and "seem" do some work here: reporting on your own perception in a very clear way does not excuse flagrantly bad behavior, but in the interest of encouraging honesty of self-report, it does provide some cover. Second, "supporters of those theories" is a reasonably specific group in this context, in a way that "conservatives" simply is not.
Now to what you said:
They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Any time you find yourself slipping into "us" versus "them" language, odds are pretty good you're running afoul of the rules somewhere. At minimum, it tends toward consensus-building or antagonism. You didn't even don the fig leaf of "it seems to me that they are ignorant." Maybe this is because what you wrote there was taking a certain outside perspective--"they" switches from "conservatives" to liberals" in your second paragraph, so you are raising the defense that "this is what some people think, not me but some people." But the level of heat you put into what "some people" think still falls on the wrong side of the rules, I think.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
You are absolutely free to relentlessly plumb the problems with some specific politician's take on Jewish space lasers being weather control machines or whatever. I even think there is something directionally correct about your comment, in the sense that I think most people are somewhat low-agency by my preferred standards.
But when you additionally frame all that in a broad swipe at your outgroup, I'm afraid it just becomes a boo light instead of a meaningful contribution to discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it.
She talked about it, and that is one thing Trump also did. Is it your position that Trump's "fight like hell" comment is irrelevant and should not be raised?
Because sure: as far as I know, Hillary didn't have conversations with election officials about "finding" votes. She knew to only cheat with the aid of close confidantes, not party randos.
Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.
I intended that to be a lighthearted throwaway comment, which I intended to signal through the "I don't want to read too much into this." Sorry that wasn't sufficiently clear, I should know better than to attempt humor around here. Though you will notice that there were no actual factual errors in my comment: it was after (i.e. later in time) the election process reforms that Florida became reliably red (for now!). That should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias, that you'd have such a... strong reaction to factual claims, just because they happen to present a narrative you don't like.
For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government.
@Dean handled this one amply, I think. This is medieval thinking from you. They're not hiding the Darksaber in the podium, and besides, we have three co-equal branches of government. Democrats didn't hesitate to storm the Supreme Court building, to say nothing of state buildings. No, Democrats did not do exactly the same thing in exactly the same place as Republicans, but you seem committed to riding the "it's different when we do it" train to the very last stop. You are engaged in special pleading.
It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this.
Right back at you, though, seriously. I don't like Trump. I don't like rioting. I'm happy to condemn both. I don't think it's insane to be upset about riots, whether Republican or Democrat. I think it's insane to treat Republican excess as a national emergency, while winking and shrugging at a laundry list of Democratic excesses.
And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win?
I didn't ask if you would have a problem with the system. I asked, "if Donald Trump wins in November, [would you] reject the outcome of that election?"
Because you said:
There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.
It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so.
I read this as you genuinely worrying that Trump would bring about an end to democratic elections. This seems like an insane worry to me, but I can imagine believing this for real. And if you did believe this for real, wouldn't it be in your interest (and the interest of the nation) to do whatever you could to prevent Trump from taking office?
Because for a lot of people in 2016, and 2020, and 2024, that seems to be the thinking. Cheating in debates or stacking primaries may not be the literal same thing as calling election officials with pointed questions about unusual polling circumstances (a water main? really?)--but it comes from the same mental attitude, namely: winning this election is more important than any standards, norms, or traditions that might be in my way. I agree that Trump gives zero fucks for standards, norms, or traditions. But it would be nice if we could stop pretending (and insisting!) that Clinton, Biden, Harris, etc. are any different in this regard. They're just (usually) slicker and sneakier about it.
That all seems basically correct to me. What you seem to have left out is that America in the 20th century developed a tradition of viewing the Press as the impartial, truth-oriented watchdogs of culture and society (to the point that journalists now feel comfortable calling it a "fact check" when they disagree with someone, or even simply disapprove of the framing of an issue). The Press has grown more partisan, but public perception hasn't caught up to that--even though most people understand that some news outlets are partisan hacks, their preferred sources are exempted. Gell Mann amnesia at an institutional level, as it were.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
I am utterly unmoved by your repeated resort to "it's different when we do it," which is why I asked you the question I was interested in hearing an answer to. That you have written two responses to my downstream tangents while avoiding a direct answer to my direct question strengthens my impression that your original question was disingenuous and "boo outgroup" rather than sincere, as I had hoped.
Because ultimately if you're actually interested in the government (or anyone!) doing something to convince Republicans of the legitimacy of election outcomes, such that no one riots, or questions the legitimacy of the proceedings, or attempts arcane procedural shenanigans... that same "something" should presumably also prevent riots, or questions, or shenanigans, from Democrats.
If you can't think of a way to prevent Democrats from rioting in case of a Trump win in November, then why in God's name would you think it should be possible to prevent Republicans from doing so in case Kamala wins?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
It's weird how we're only successful at rigging some of the time, when in other countries, with actual governments that rig elections (that many of the people who are very worried about rigging in American elections prefer to the American govenrment) are always successful.
It's not weird at all, once you understand checks and balances, enumerated powers, and the structure of the Constitution generally. It's hard to rig American elections successfully. And yet for example "gerrymandering" is widely agreed to be a (frequently successful!) form of election rigging, even though it does not necessarily guarantee the desired outcome.
A totalitarian or even just an excessively powerful executive can afford to be hamfisted in their rigging of elections; to successfully rig an American election usually calls for greater subtlety, and even then there remains a greater likelihood of failure.
No, this attitude is 100% Molochian. The odds of your one vote altering the outcome of the election are infinitesimal. Treating your vote as a strategic move in a game assumes a completely unrealistic degree of personal agency and impact. The psychological impact that voting (or not voting!) has on you is almost certainly (>99%) the only impact your vote will have on anyone, anywhere. In distant second place, your protest vote for a third party might contribute to making an impression on someone in power, such that they shift their policy priorities slightly toward your expressed preferences.
Of course, from the perspective of an American political party the most important voters to persuade are precisely those voters who are least likely to cast a vote for either major party candidate: the ones not already ideologically captured by either party. Consequently it is in both the Democrat and Republican parties' best interests to perpetuate the idea that because third party candidates are not "viable," it is a waste to vote for the candidate you prefer; you must vote only for the major party candidate you hate least!
Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.
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